“Rushes”

“Rushes” is an immediate standout from Endless, the... thing that Frank Ocean released today. (A visual album? Album album? Album teaser?) It’s tough to know what these songs are meant to be. They could be doodles from his sketchbook, they could be unvarnished cris de coeur. But “Rushes” drifts daringly far from any music Frank Ocean has ever made before. The sound on Channel Orange was mostly friendly, plush, sunny, with rich keyboard chords and rounded, warm thumps of drums like two beach floats gently colliding. On “Rushes,” Ocean’s voice rings out from a cavernous echo, as if the house from “Super Rich Kids” has been foreclosed and the kids, now older, sit forlornly in the drained pool.

There is a guitar somewhere in the mix—played by bedroom-pop Orchid Tapes affiliate Alex G, of all people—and it is a murmuring, vaporous sound behind Ocean’s high, thin voice. “Tell me what you need from me/Gas money,” he sings, the lyrics blurred. “Infatuation’s a rush.” Howling back-up singers, so faraway they sound like an arranger’s idea of background singers to be hired later, enter. The song has a purposefully fragmented feeling, similar to The Life of Pablo’s “Father Stretch My Hands,” where torn-off song pieces were tossed in the air, like colorful scarves, and allowed to hang near each other instead of stitched together.

All of these inchoate elements sound, at first, like a very talented person’s soon-to-be-finished demo. Then something clear and sharp happens: A drum track, its hi-hats clipping into the red, sputters to life, and the song is suddenly tootling away from you, a rusted old European motorcycle rounding a bend and out of sight. Whatever else Frank is doing right now—suffering from nerves, purposefully stoking excitement, indulging in old-fashioned perfectionism, etc.—his music continues to make his case for him.